SAN FRANCISCO / Public Works Dept. faulted for work on fixing potholes

Cecilia M. Vega, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, January 10, 2007

The San Francisco agency responsible for maintaining city streets and sidewalks is spending more money to keep those stretches of pavement clean and free of potholes, but they don't appear to be in any better shape, according to an audit released Tuesday.

The San Francisco budget analyst's office concluded in a 181-page report that the Department of Public Works is not responding to requests to remove graffiti in a timely manner, is failing to prune overgrown trees and cannot demonstrate that its street-repair projects are done cost-effectively.

"Their costs have gone up but they can't demonstrate that their delivery of services have increased, too," said Ken Bruce, a senior manager in the budget analyst office. "In fact, we have many contrary indicators that services are not improving."

Though the report focused on management issues within the department, it identified a number of problems within the agency that have the potential to directly affect city residents.

For example, trees maintained by the department get pruned on average every seven years, even though the department's goal is to prune them every three years. At the same time, last fiscal year the department spent $1.6 million to settle claims related to incidents in which its trees either injured people or caused damage to property, amounting to 58 percent of the total claims settled by Public Works.

While thousands of requests were made to the department during that time to clean streets or remove graffiti, in many cases DPW employees failed to resolve the requests within 48 hours -- the goal the agency has set to address such complaints. Nearly 19 percent of all street cleaning service requests and 68 percent of graffiti removal requests were not resolved within 48 hours, according to the audit.

The budget analyst's office conducted the audit at the request of the Board of Supervisors. In a written response, public works officials agreed with all but three of the audit's 120 recommendations.

"There are no major findings in the report in our view," DPW Director Fred Abadi said Tuesday. "There are a lot of good recommendations to do a better job, and many of them we were already working on. There's nothing here that's earthshaking."

The audit, however, does come at a touchy time for Mayor Gavin Newsom, who is headed into a November re-election having pledged in his 2006 State of the City speech to focus on quality-of-life issues like repairing potholes and maintaining sidewalks.

During that speech, Newsom announced a plan that would push property owners to maintain their sidewalks by having city workers repair problems and either directly bill property owners or add the cost to their property taxes -- something Abadi on Tuesday said could help the department keep the city's streets in check.

"There's always room for improvement and that's always the focus of this administration, how do we improve the delivery of services," Newsom spokesman Peter Ragone said.

Although last year the Board of Supervisors allocated more than $15 million from the city's general fund so that Public Works could pay for street resurfacing projects such as patching streets and filling in potholes, there's no way to tell whether the projects have been completed efficiently, the audit found.

"The department does not routinely track average project labor costs and productivity to ensure that projects are completed efficiently," the report said.

Abadi, who became the agency's director in March, disputed that claim.

"It's premature," he said. "The money was allocated in the middle of last year. It remains to be seen whether we can do it efficiently or not."

Supervisor Sean Elsbernd, who spearheaded the city's 10-year capital plan, which aims to improve San Francisco's streets and infrastructure, expressed concerns about the report's findings.

"I want to continue making this kind of investment but when there are numbers like this and analyses like this that demonstrate they're not even tracking performance, it weakens my argument for filling funding for things like street resurfacing," he said.

Other findings in the report include:

-- Public Works inspectors do not conduct routine inspections of streets to identify safety hazards;

-- The department does not keep records of its routine maintenance on properties it is charged with maintaining;

-- The department's Bureau of Street and Sewer Repair spent more than $1.1 million in salaries and benefits last year to cover the cost of "nonproductive hours," or those workers who are out on sick leave and disability.

-- Seventy-eight percent of the department's Bureau of Construction Management projects last year were not finished by the original completion date, hiking construction costs and denying the public access to facilities.

-- Between June 2003 and August 2006, the department's Bureau of Street Environmental Services levied $1.3 million in fines for litter citations but collected only $524,209.

Latest from the SFGATE homepage:

Click below for the top news from around the Bay Area and beyond. Sign up for our newsletters to be the first to learn about breaking news and more. Go to 'Sign In' and 'Manage Profile' at the top of the page.